How to Fix iTunes
Several people were interested in this, so I figured a new post was better than replying in several places.
I believe what I did was this:
1) Click on the little dark/light rectangle in the top left — the one with a down arrow next to it, that does nothing to tell you what it’s for. (Design failure #1: I’m clicking semi-randomly on things to find out what they are.)
2) In that menu, tell it to show me the menu bar.
3) Now I have a “File/Edit/View/etc” bar. Thank god. But there’s something else I have to do before that can become useful.
4) Click over to Songs in that top ribbon — not the menu bar I just brought in.
5) This allows me to deal with the “Column Browser” sub-menu under “View,” which was inactive when I was still on the default Artist tab. I think it defaulted to showing me the column browser (which is what I wanted), but if not, you can turn it on here.
6) Now you have your genres/artists/albums listings up above, with the songs below, like it used to be (at least for me). But where the hell are my playlists and such, that used to be on the left???
7) Again under “View,” click “Show Sidebar.”
8) If you want, you can also click “Show Status Bar,” which gives you back the bottom edge of the window, where it lists stats.
That got me back all the navigational tools I was accustomed to using. I basically will never click on that top ribbon again, the one with “Songs/Artists/Albums/etc,” as any tab other than “Songs” is Ye Newe Terrible View.
Also, the “shuffle” button now operates more like on an iPod: it’s up by the top of a playlist name, and you click on it to start the music playing in a shuffled fashion. If, once it’s started, you want to turn off shuffling, that’s in the window where it shows time, etc.
Hopefully that’s useful to people.